Jon Lovett

Humor is a way of saying we're all seeing the same ridiculous, absurd, infuriating things together.

I went into politics for the reasons most people do: ambition, self-righteousness, and a desire to help others.

There's only so much mistrust we can take before things get much worse.

The one thing I didn't want to do was a show about the White House. I was too close to it.

It's certainly true that presidents have confidantes who rise above what you would call just staff.

'The West Wing' was an incredible, inspiring show - and one of the reasons I wanted to be a speechwriter.

'Veep' is a great satire of democracy.

The great thing about writing jokes for President Obama is that he is not afraid to tell jokes that are actually funny - and not just funny for a politician.

It was awesome how supportive the White House was. It meant a lot to me that when I left, the people that I worked with - Jon Favreau and David Axelrod and others - really understood that this was something that I felt I held had to do.

I had never really planned on being a speechwriter.

I'm motivated by a bottomless well of anger. It's a joke, but I don't think I don't mean it.

It is extremely chilling that Donald Trump views the spectacle of choosing cabinet appointments in a way that is similar to deciding whether or not to fire Lil Jon or Joan Rivers.

It doesn't matter what the early votes look like. It doesn't matter what the polls look like. We can lose everything.

Nationalism is not that hard. It's not that hard to incite people against another, and it's also - and this is the harder thing: Democrats have, and the challenge we have all the time, is we believe in governing and governance and trying to find middle ground.

Barack Obama took office in the middle of a massive financial crisis. He was handed a bunch of messes all around the world and at home.

Little things had to go wrong for Donald Trump to become president: Comey, emails, all that stuff. Big things did make Trump possible. Big, cultural, political, economic forces opened the door to someone like Trump.

One thing that is for certain is that there are tens of millions of people who are deeply unsatisfied with the way they get their political news.

One of the lessons of 2016 is to spend less time worrying about what will happen and more time worrying about what we want to happen.

'Pod Save America' will be a kingmaker.

So often on CNN, there's a world-class journalist interviewing campaign rejects and ideologues and silly, craven people who do not care about informing people, that aren't there to help people understand what's going on in the news.

I'm not insulting Trump supporters; I'm calling the people that CNN puts on television terrible representatives of the views of conservatives.

I don't live in the city of L.A. I live in West Hollywood.

Most of my time at the White House, I wrote very unfunny speeches, but every year, I would work on the correspondents' dinner, which was a reminder of this other kind of writing that I loved to do.

'1600 Penn' was a hit. It's 2018. Anything you want can be true.

I could have continued being a speechwriter for as long as I wanted.

They're the last human beings susceptible to human shame. Politicians are the only people left for whom, occasionally, shame hurts them. Everyone else, we've sort of done away with it as a concept, and we're hurtling through space like animals, basically.

More and more people support equality for their gay friends and neighbors, and that is not because the 'Duck Dynasty' guy almost lost his show.

We need people to point out groupthink - We need people to point out stale, old, dumb thinking - and we sometimes need to do that when it's considered dangerous, strange, or, by some, offensive. And we should be, all of us, trying to protect that. It's really important.

We have a lot of really boring, silly, stupid politics. We need people to point that out.

If you can make someone laugh about something that your opponent or your opposition thinks, that means you've done a really good job of highlighting what's wrong with their argument or their position.

I will never apologize for selective editing to make myself look better.

Making '1600 Penn' was really fun, and I learned a lot.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. That's what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential and aware of your inexperience.

We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak.

As a rule, I think people in L.A. are interested in any writer who brings a different skill set and experiences. There's an attraction to novelty and to anyone whose writing isn't based in screenwriting. I had that novelty.

It's a reasonable thing to tell somebody, 'I've watched 70 hours of 'Game of Thrones.'' That's a totally normal, boring thing to say about yourself. But if you were like, 'I just spent 100 hours playing 'Skyrim,'' people think you're a weirdo.

I spent three years working at the White House and wanted to do something that wasn't about passing bills and resolutions.

We try to talk when the microphones are on the same way we would when the microphones are off.

There is an incredible appetite out there for in-depth, high-level conversations about what's going on.

I would like to be able to write in my own voice.

It's always been a dream of mine to write comedy and be creative.

The Internet didn't cause Donald Trump, and it certainly can't solve Donald Trump.

Humor connects us, especially in politics. It's a way of surprising one another with shared context and experience.

Everybody hates Congress; even Congress hates Congress.

Part of my job as a presidential speechwriter (along with great writers like Jon Favreau and David Axelrod) was finding that sliver where 'presidential' and 'actually funny' overlap.

Kellyanne Conway is one of the most dishonest humans ever to grace the office she holds.

When a joke works, it works. It can make a point in a really simple way; it can be a great little sound bite to put on television or share on social media. Humor has this incredible power in how we communicate about politics now, in part because there's something natural in the way it's communicated.

A boring speech can be just a boring speech. But a speech with a joke that falls flat is awful. I hate it. That's why I think it's easier to hate a comedy. If a drama doesn't land, it's boring; if a joke doesn't land - you hate that.

Whenever you're talking about using humor in politics or in a policy speech or in a serious moment, you're talking about using it as a tool to engage people. That's why putting a joke in a political speech is a luxury, and it is always a risk.

The First Amendment's protections have always put a great deal of responsibility in our hands: not only to respect the power of our own speech, but also to respect that same power in the hands of people we despise.